Constancy in love is of two sorts: One is the effect of new excellencies that are always presenting themselves afresh, and attract... our affections continually; the other is only from a point of honor, and a taking of pride not to change.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Carlyle, a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetorician out of necessity, constantly aroused by the craving for a strong faith... as well as by the feeling of an incapacity for it (Min this respect a typical romantic!).... Fundamentally, Carlyle is an English atheist who makes it a point of honor not to be one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

No child should be brought up to suppose that its food and clothes come down from heaven or are miraculously conjured from empty s...pace by papa. Loathsome as we have made the idea of duty (like the idea of work) we must habituate children to a sense of repayable obligation to the community for what they consume and enjoy, and inculcate the repayment as a point of honor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The gangster's world is less open, and his arts not so easily identifiable as the Westerner's. Perhaps he too can keep his counten...ance, but the mask he wears is really no mask: its purpose is precisely to make evident the fact that he desperately wants to "get ahead" and will stop at nothing. Where the Westerner imposes himself by the appearance of unshakable control, the gangster's pre-eminence lies in the suggestion that he may at any moment lose control; his strength is not in being able to shoot faster or straighter than others, but in being more willing to shoot. "Do it first," say Scarface expounding his mode of operation, "and keep on doing it!" With the Westerner, it is a crucial point of honor not to "do it first"; his gun remains in his holster until the moment of combat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy--common clay, if you like--eating, breeding, workin...g, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others--the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Our bodies are shaped to bear children, and our lives are a working out of the processes of creation. All our ambitions and intell...igence are beside that great elemental point.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: n...ot so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »